Reforming Public Education Should Begin in the Classroom

The state Department of Education has again given California high schools a failing grade in everything from college attendance rates and UC eligibility of students to students’ average SAT scores and graduation rates. According to the most recent statistics, just 81.1% of high school students, statewide, are graduating in four years, only 52.8% are taking course work making them eligible for admission to the University of California and only 19.5% are scoring average or better on the SAT/ACT. Combined with the disclosure that, in 1994, 49% of freshmen in the California State University System required remedial English and 54% needed remedial math, the shortcomings of public education are hard to deny.

In the 1970s, teachers and administrators blamed low pay for such mediocre academic results. In the 1980s, it became a lack of parental involvement, especially among “at-risk” students. Today, the favored explanations center on too many illegal-immigrant students, cultural barriers and students’ limited English proficiency.

Yet, the most common new complaint, and excuse, from teachers is more persuasive: class size. There is too much “overcrowding” in California’s public schools. Teachers would be better able to teach if they were expected to teach fewer students. Teachers’ unions, in a television campaign, are using the issue to entice young people into the profession. Their interests are clear: The smaller the classes, the more classes, the more teachers hired, and the more dues-paying membership. The imagery of 40 students squeezed like sardines into a classroom constructed for 20 is easy to understand and difficult to challenge.

Unfortunately, the class-size complaint does not tell the whole story. While vivid, it is dishonest about the reasons why some students receive less instruction, and do less well, than others. Some things about education in this century have not changed. It is still the case, for instance, that much more important than class size is what goes on in class.

I recently returned to my old school district as a multiple-level substitute teacher. My first assignment was to a third-grade classroom, a grade level for which the case can be made that smaller classes are more easily managed, thus allowing teachers to teach.

At upper-grade levels, however, there are more subtle means of control. At the local junior high school, which garnered national honors, a teacher instructed me to administer a “placement exam” to bilingual students. They would not know much of the material, she assured me, but the test allowed the district to determine what they did know in advance of their entering high school. The teacher explained that the exercise would allow school officials to “track” the students. “Even though,” she said, “we aren’t supposed to do that.”

The practice of tracking, always prevalent, promotes a philosophy of “win some, lose some.” Not all students can be reached, it assumes at the outset. So, class size, whether 30 or 13, is largely irrelevant. The most pressing problem may not be class size but, rather, an unequal distribution, among students, of teacher attention, encouragement and expectation. Decreasing class size will not necessarily ensure that teachers will spread their efforts more equitably.

Teachers are likely to run their classrooms as they have all along, albeit in front of fewer students. They will still make up their own minds about which students can be reached, and which cannot. And make them up early. Speaking to a roomful of graduate students in education, I was asked by one of them if he would be expected to teach “some of these kids” in light of their “family and cultural influences.” In other words, he expected some types of students to be easy to reach, while others nearly impossible. The son of a school-board member or professional would, he apparently assumed, would be more easily saved than the daughter of Hmong parents who did not speak English. Never mind that immigrant students are the hardest-working, most driven and most obedient of all. The graduate student, and eventual teacher, had already made up his mind that his education career would be one of win some, lose some. Worse, he had made that judgment before ever stepping foot into a classroom.

After the release of the latest dismal statistics, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin seized the opportunity to ask for more money from taxpayers and private industry. Eastin charged that, for classrooms in California, with its resources in entertainment and technology, to lack video and computer equipment amounts to “adult malpractice.” Eastin also wants to limit class size to 20 students at the K-3 level.

All right. Given California schools’ flunking grade, it might be money well spent. Parents are never as vulnerable to a solicitation of tax money by the public school system as they are on the morning after a bad report card. Methodically, they scan their newspapers in search of the test scores of their child’s school, then compare them to those of rival schools nearby. If disappointed, they are ripe for the pitch and ready to pay for everything from more computers and books to bigger libraries and new gymnasiums. But, without greater regulation of classroom instruction and more accountability from teachers and administrators, are such investments sound?

What assurance is Eastin willing to give in return for a commitment of more tax dollars that, once class size is reduced, the actual business of what goes on in those smaller classes will change? What guarantees does she offer that the age-old practice of teachers playing favorites will end?

In no other California industry are workers retained, advanced and rewarded for producing a product that is embarrassingly inadequate, at best. The state’s public schools, however, continue to produce widgets that simply do not work. Talk about malpractice.*